5 Things to Know about Martin Scorsese's Hugo

Martin Scorsese's Hugo, in theaters November 23, is his first stereoscopic film. The stars, writer and producer talked filming in 3D, the amazing sets, and the research Scorsese asked them to do to prepare for their roles. Spoilers inside!

Martin Scorsese's Hugo, in theaters November 23, is not just about a boy who must unravel a secret left to him by his father, but an ode to the very first filmmaker to use narrative and special effects: Georges Méliès. It's also Scorsese's first stereoscopic film. At a press conference, the stars, writer and producer of Hugo talked filming in 3D, the amazing sets, and the research Scorsese asked them to do to prepare for their roles. Spoilers below!

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Scorsese Has Always Wanted to Do a 3D Film

Scorsese Has Always Wanted to Do a 3D Film

Martin Scorsese saw his first stereoscopic film in 1953—Andre de Toth's House of Wax. One year later, he saw Hitchcock's Dial M For Murder. The 3D in that film, which enhanced the narrative, left a lasting impression on the filmmaker. So it was natural that Scorsese would use 3D to that effect in Hugo.

In one scene, in which the Station Inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen) is interrogating Hugo (Asa Butterfield), a wide interocular setting makes him seem more menacing and intimidating. Likewise, 3D creates a feeling of vertigo during a chase sequence up a staircase in the walls of the station.

"There's something about Scorsese using the latest 3D technology to push the boundaries of filmmaking in 2011 to make a film about the very first technology ever used to put magic on the screen over a hundred years ago," Emily Mortimer, who played flower shop owner Lisette, said. Baron Cohen agreed. "It felt like it was the logical extension of filmmaking—that if Méliès was alive, he would have definitely been using 3D," he said. "That was the interesting thing—the whole debate in cinema about whether 3D is a gimmick or not. Scorsese really showed that it was a logical development of the filmmaking process, and that was fascinating."

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The Film Team Constructed Full-Scale Sets

The Film Team Constructed Full-Scale Sets

Though Hugo takes place in Paris, filming was mostly done in England's Shepperton Studios. Scorsese brought on researcher Marianne Bower, who looked at historical photographs, films, and documents to lend authenticity to the sets, which were constructed to scale in the studio.

At 150 feet long, 120 feet wide and 41 feet high, the train station set filled an entire soundstage—Sir Ben Kingsley, who played Méliès, admitted to walking around the set between takes and admiring the detail. Even the station's clocks that Hugo (Asa Butterfield) repaired were actually built. "They would bring the clocks down from the ceiling and we would go inside of them," Butterfield says. "In the hanging clock tower, there was this big spinning thing, and a lot of the time I would stand up and it would smack me in the head. And the work on the clocks was incredible—you could actually wind them, and they had weights on."

The experience was overwhelming for Brian Setzer, who wrote the novel the film is based on. "When I visited the set for the first time, I was taken from the entrance to the graveyard—where posters were peeling off the wall and vines were dying up it—through the entire graveyard, where there were all these beautiful, hand-sculpted graves," he says. "As you exited the graveyard, you came to a full-size cobblestone street and the full block of buildings was there: A fully stocked wine shop on one end where you probably could have gotten drunk, and on the other end a building that had been bombed during World War I that was being held up by some timber. You walked inside the building, down an actual Parisian apartment building hallway—which I was told was designed after the staircase in The 400 Blows—and then up into a full-scale apartment. I had the great thrill of being put into the last scene of the movie. We spent a lot of the day filming the last tracking shot in the kitchen, waiting for the action to do the 3-minute tracking shot again. The camera never goes into the kitchen, but we would open the cabinet doors and it was fully stocked, and we were talking about what we could cook. And inside the wall, which the camera could certainly never see, were period light switches."

Scorsese Has Always Wanted to Do a 3D Film

Martin Scorsese saw his first stereoscopic film in 1953—Andre de Toth's House of Wax. One year later, he saw Hitchcock's Dial M For Murder. The 3D in that film, which enhanced the narrative, left a lasting impression on the filmmaker. So it was natural that Scorsese would use 3D to that effect in Hugo.

In one scene, in which the Station Inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen) is interrogating Hugo (Asa Butterfield), a wide interocular setting makes him seem more menacing and intimidating. Likewise, 3D creates a feeling of vertigo during a chase sequence up a staircase in the walls of the station.

"There's something about Scorsese using the latest 3D technology to push the boundaries of filmmaking in 2011 to make a film about the very first technology ever used to put magic on the screen over a hundred years ago," Emily Mortimer, who played flower shop owner Lisette, said. Baron Cohen agreed. "It felt like it was the logical extension of filmmaking—that if Méliès was alive, he would have definitely been using 3D," he said. "That was the interesting thing—the whole debate in cinema about whether 3D is a gimmick or not. Scorsese really showed that it was a logical development of the filmmaking process, and that was fascinating."

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The Film Team Constructed Full-Scale Sets

Though Hugo takes place in Paris, filming was mostly done in England's Shepperton Studios. Scorsese brought on researcher Marianne Bower, who looked at historical photographs, films, and documents to lend authenticity to the sets, which were constructed to scale in the studio.

At 150 feet long, 120 feet wide and 41 feet high, the train station set filled an entire soundstage—Sir Ben Kingsley, who played Méliès, admitted to walking around the set between takes and admiring the detail. Even the station's clocks that Hugo (Asa Butterfield) repaired were actually built. "They would bring the clocks down from the ceiling and we would go inside of them," Butterfield says. "In the hanging clock tower, there was this big spinning thing, and a lot of the time I would stand up and it would smack me in the head. And the work on the clocks was incredible—you could actually wind them, and they had weights on."

The experience was overwhelming for Brian Setzer, who wrote the novel the film is based on. "When I visited the set for the first time, I was taken from the entrance to the graveyard—where posters were peeling off the wall and vines were dying up it—through the entire graveyard, where there were all these beautiful, hand-sculpted graves," he says. "As you exited the graveyard, you came to a full-size cobblestone street and the full block of buildings was there: A fully stocked wine shop on one end where you probably could have gotten drunk, and on the other end a building that had been bombed during World War I that was being held up by some timber. You walked inside the building, down an actual Parisian apartment building hallway—which I was told was designed after the staircase in The 400 Blows—and then up into a full-scale apartment. I had the great thrill of being put into the last scene of the movie. We spent a lot of the day filming the last tracking shot in the kitchen, waiting for the action to do the 3-minute tracking shot again. The camera never goes into the kitchen, but we would open the cabinet doors and it was fully stocked, and we were talking about what we could cook. And inside the wall, which the camera could certainly never see, were period light switches."

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Scorsese Made the Actors—and His Production Team—Do Their Homework

The director not only made his cast and crew watch House of Wax and Dial M for Murder, but he also asked them to movies from 1930s, the period when Hugo is set. Required viewing for Mortimer was Rene Clare's Under The Rooftops of Paris. Butterfield watched films that inspired Scorsese as a filmmaker. Baron Cohen took in some classic Chaplin. And Kingsley, of course, watched hours of Méliès's films.

"[It] was hugely useful to me not only to understand his language of cinema, but also how he multitasked to an extraordinary degree," Kingsley says. "When you're watching his films, you see a great performer, but when reading the footnotes you realize that he wrote, choreographed, directed, edited, designed, starred. I think he must have gotten 4 hours of sleep a night, because having worked in his glass studio [during the day], he then went to the musical in Paris to saw people in half and all kinds of fun things like that. Martin really saturated us with wonderful material to watch."

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The Automaton Was Actually Functional

One character key to the plot of Hugo isn't a person, but the automaton Hugo's father brings home from a museum to repair. Early automatons were driven by cam systems, and their functions were programmed in letter by letter—so what they could do was very limited. But prop builder Dick George used modern technology to construct 15 automatons, each with a specific movement called for in the script. By using a computer system to program their functions, the robots could do any movement or task necessary for filming. Butterfield said that the automaton felt like another actor during filming; Sir Ben Kingsley, who plays Poppa Georges, said the robot "took on a life of its own. It was very touching and beautiful to watch the little chap turn his head, dip his pen into a pot of ink and draw the face of the moon, which I watched it do with my own two eyes."

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The Silent Films were Painstakingly Recreated Frame by Frame—Using the Techniques of the Time

In his time, Georges Méliès created more than 500 films, and behind-the-scenes sequences of Kingsley as Méliès at work on 1903's Kingdom of the Fairies are key to Hugo's plot. To pull it off, Scorsese had his team construct a replica of Méliès's glass studio from existing designs, measurements, and photos of the original building. Cinematheque Francaise provided diagrams for the filmmaker's method of filming "underwater"—a fishtank placed close to the camera, with a full set behind it—so Scorsese could replicate the effect.

Other scenes from Méliès's films, including his iconic 1902 film, Voyage to the Moon, were also included. Visual effects supervisor Rob Legato was charged with figuring out how to accurately replicate the effects Méliès created using only the tools and techniques available in the early 1900s. Likewise, Scorsese took pains to recreate every aspect of the scenes from Méliès's films, from the costumes to the choreography.

"I can't describe the lengths to which we went to create the spirit of Méliès in the studio," Legato says. "The costumes, the makeup, the lighting, the assistant directors working out the blocking and expressions of the actors exactly as they looked in the original films. It's as accurate as we could get matching the clips, beat for beat."